Django CMS, Haystack, and Custom Plugins

When you need a full-text search for Django-CMS-based website, you can use Haystack and django-cms-search. The latter module ensures that all CMS Pages get indexed.

One important thing to mention is that if you use any custom Plugins, search_fields need to be defined for them, so that the Pages using them are indexed properly. For example, here is an Overview plugin which makes its title and description searchable:

from django.db import models
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
from cms.models import CMSPlugin

class Overview(CMSPlugin):
    title = models.CharField(_('Title'), max_length=200)
    description = models.TextField(_('Description'))
    url = models.URLField(_('url'), max_length=200, blank=True)
    
    search_fields = ("title", "description")
    
    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.title
        

For more information check the documentation online:

• Haystack
• Django CMS
• django-cms-search